NearLife Experience
by BehrBeMine
Summary: The most interesting thing to Dawn about Buffy these days is how she follows trouble and gets in its way.


Title: Near-Life Experience  
Author: BehrBeMine  
Disclaimer: I don't own a thing; just showcasing my love for the Summers girls and their world beyond.  
Feedback: I'd love it.  
Summary: The most interesting thing to Dawn about Buffy these days is how she follows trouble and gets in its way.  
Rating: PG-13 -- one swear word, I believe  
Pairing: Genfic. It's all about Dawn.  
Timeline/Spoilers: As a part of the **dawnallalong** challenge, this takes place during the season three episode 'Bad Girls'.  
Note: Thanks for the fabulous and quick beta go to Desirata41. Thanks also to lillaluv for the look over; also thanks to her, along with stolenglimpse, for their help with my idiotic questions. :)  
Another Note: Challenge or not, I seem to be writing a lot of these Dawn oneshots, filling in the gaps where her memory was forged. I'm just throwing this out there, but would anyone be interested in a series about her childhood? I might look into writing one.

- -  
Dawn got a new magnifying glass in her spy kit with the collectible lunchbox. She decided she wouldn't carry her lunch to school anymore in a square-shaped box with cartoon characters on it, but the magnifying glass she did keep. It was a fascinating tool that could make ants look gargantuan while still fitting neatly into the belt buckle of her jeans. She carried it everywhere, examining everything.

She didn't know there were things better left unseen.

--

"I don't think monsters can be that bad when all you need to kill them is this stick thing," Dawn said to Buffy in the kitchen one night. She sat at the counter, turning the stake over in her small hands, testing the sharpness of its point with her fingers. She touched it just slightly. As if she were Princess Aurora and the thimble could prick despite her braveness.

Buffy gave her an annoyed glance before continuing to rummage through the cabinets. "I hate it when Mom does this. She just goes off to the gallery all night and leaves us with nothing edible to eat."

"If you could cook, then there's a lot of stuff." Dawn thought Buffy ate too much. She'd watch her, sometimes, as she stuffed four pieces of pizza down her throat in one sitting. Who could seriously work so hard they needed four slices of pizza to fill their stomach when it didn't even stick out? Buffy was like a skinny pig. She even snorted sometimes when she scoffed at Dawn.

"Why don't you learn how to cook? I'm kinda busy with the whole high school, plus saving the world gig."

Buffy was always bragging about how she saved the world. Yeah, like cops and firefighters didn't help, too?

Dawn rolled her eyes and turned her attention back to the stake. She grabbed her magnifying glass from her belt loop and began looking more closely at the chiseled wood. She found what she thought was a spot of blood dried on. Blood dried to look brown, she'd learned. After her nighttime nosebleeds, sometimes she'd sneak back into the bathroom to magnify the tissues in the garbage can. The red always turned brown, which she thought was a shame. Nothing was more exciting or eye-catching than red.

Buffy's friend Faith wore red lipstick all the time. Dawn watched Faith's lips carefully that night she came over for dinner. She waited to see the pretty sheen rub off with the intake of so much food. But even at the end of the meal, Faith looked the same as when she'd come. _Bad girls wear red_, was what Faith told her before heading out with Buffy to patrol. Dawn pressed her naked lips together and stored that knowledge in her spy notebook, where she kept all of her important life lessons. Nothing from school, because school had its own notebooks. Nothing about her everyday routine; she had her journals for that. This one was only for top secret, special things Dawn learned about life. Things only she and a couple other people could know.

--

Dawn followed Buffy the most in her spy travels, tool kit and official headband in place to show that she, too, had a calling. One day, she and her extra bright flashlight could say they "saved the world", too.

Buffy hogged the bathroom in the mornings, giving Dawn precious little time to brush both teeth and hair. In her impatience one day, she abandoned the search for the day's outfit, and dropped to the floor with her magnifying glass to the faded footsteps in the carpet. She told Buffy she had fat feet, but that only served to slow down the bathroom wait even further.

That afternoon, Buffy swept her bouncy golden hair into a tight ponytail, hurriedly pulling every strand through the elastic loop. Getting ready for patrol again. Probably soon, Faith would stop by to bang on the front door and hurry Buffy up. Faith had what Buffy called "fucked up priorities" one time when she didn't know Dawn was in the room. It was strange that Buffy had said that, because more and more, behind the magnifying glass, the two Slayers were becoming as one in many ways.

Dawn counted the backs of her teeth with her candy-hungry tongue and thought about having two big sisters. Maybe Faith would be more fun and relaxed with her. She had said one time that Buffy was uptight, which had made Dawn smile. Something about Faith scared her slightly, but she liked the insults she could dish out. They were so... _bad_. Like Faith didn't have a care in the world what anyone thought of anything she did.

Last week, Dawn wanted to be that way. It got her grounded in the end, though, when she said her mother's parmesan chicken "sucked worse than potato soup".

She strived to learn Faith's secrets. How she stayed the way she was without punishment. But in the meantime, there was more life to be examined. Dawn shined her most important tool on the two butterflies flitting around the prickly bush in the back yard. She looked for traces of red in their pretty color patterns, but all she found was brown.

--

Though there was more homework this year than she'd been accustomed to, Dawn still found time to ponder the important things. Why ants were so small but could carry their own weight. Why red turned to brown. Whether what Buffy did was right or not.

"Nikki's mom works at the big church by the grocery store," Dawn said, shoveling macaroni and cheese into her mouth, and only losing a few noodles to the counter below. "She says punishing is for God to do."

"Becoming a religious fanatic now, Dawnie? That'll really help you not get boys when you get older."

Dawn could see Angel's strange face in her head, the intense way that he peered out at everything. "Don't tell me how to get boys," she said resolutely. "You don't know how to get boys anymore. All you know how to get is vampires."

Buffy ignored this and slurped a noodle loudly into her mouth. She loved this Kraft dinner junk, but no one else did. Which was why Buffy always made it on nights when Mom had to work. It seemed like Buffy wasn't going to answer, but then she swallowed and said, "Hey, let God step in, I'm not stopping him." She looked around just to prove her point. "Doesn't look like he's here."

"Nikki's mom says he's always there."

"Really?" Buffy's voice couldn't have been less interested. Dawn realized this must be what it was like to be one of her teachers whose words went mocked and ignored. "I think he stays hidden while I do my job. I'm sure he has an excuse -- catching up on napping or something."

"God would call you a coward for saying that." Dawn blinked as the words of her friend's mother came tumbling out of her mouth as if they were her own.

"I think he's the coward, and also, I think this conversation is over. Now get out."

"You can't kick me out of the kitchen. _I live here, too_."

"Definitely don't need to remind me of that."

Dawn glared at Buffy's back while she rinsed her dish in the sink, then just set it there, as if they had a dishwasher for nothing. Dawn wanted to say something, to say so many things, but instead she fled the kitchen and its soupy macaroni for the back yard where she found insects mating in the cool evening breeze. "Eww," she said while she giggled and had to keep looking away.

--

Dawn could hear the window opening late at night in the room next to hers; the shuffling of feet on the roof until the body jumped down to the ground. She thought of telling on Buffy, getting _her_ grounded for once, but Mom would probably just relent that it was "part of Buffy's job". Dawn was going to get even someday. She was going to own all of the McDonald's in California. She'd call herself the official food tester. And when she wanted to eat cheeseburgers and ice cream cones all night long, she could say, "It's part of my job."

The nights began to run into one another, until Dawn started losing count of how many times Buffy evacuated through her bedroom window. Dawn felt so goodie-goodie, snuggling into her pillows while her sister careened off the roof and into the night. Buffy stayed out later and later, until some mornings she'd head off to school straight from patrol. And Dawn couldn't even use her sneaky skills to inaccurately examine carpet footsteps and their meaning.

She set down her tools one morning and put them away, stashed in a big junk box in her closet. There, her data could be kept safe while she found more dangerous tasks. She wanted to find a way to garner enough attention that Buffy would be whining for it back. She wanted to be more than a spy, or a tattletale. She wanted to stay out all night long, too, and she wanted Faith's red lipstick so she could be just as bad.

She decided the next best thing to red lipstick was the red of blood. Blood, like Buffy never had to see, since vampires just fell over with one prick of a stake and smashed into dust. She went off in search of the dark liquid that hid in her veins.

Dawn walked home with Janice and her crowd of followers one afternoon when Mom couldn't pick her up from school. They walked past scary old homes with gargoyles protecting front porches and dead grass all around, starving for water and green pigment. They even went out of their way to walk past Mr. Johnson's large rose garden, where Janice whispered to Dawn and a couple of the others that they should each steal a flower. Dawn kept her "what if we get in trouble" little girl whispers to herself, and reached right out to pluck the whitest rose in the bunch.

"Girls, all girls should learn more about flowers because every girl should have a favorite, and for a reason," Janice told them all. She was so wise sometimes. It was like she knew everything before she needed to. Even some test answers.

Dawn left the group, as she was headed a different way from there, and held onto her rose with her thumb and forefinger until nosy neighbors were out of sight. She bit her lip, anticipating pain and not liking the idea, as she pressed her small finger pad to the sharpest thorn on the flower's stem. She gasped in short hisses at the pain as her skin was pricked through. But then she smiled through the gathering tears at the glorious red that spilled over. Something about it was freeing and dangerous, and at that point those seemed like the two very best things to experience.

The entire stem was stained by her blood-pricked fingers by the time she made it home. As she waited for the red to turn brown, her first time of waiting it out, she reached her house's door. Deftly, she closed it behind her with shoulder maneuvers and walked toward the kitchen.

"What's that all over your hands?" Buffy asked, setting down the dishcloth she was wringing through her own hands. Her face seemed restless; Dawn pretended not to notice. She was very busy with her experiment.

When Buffy grabbed onto both of Dawn's hands, she cried out from the pain of the Slayer-squeeze. The blood, which had begun to crust over into scabs, now rushed from her wounds anew. She hissed and snatched her hands back.

"That's going to get infected," Buffy said, dropping Dawn's hands so they could flail at her sides. "Come on. Let's get you washed up."

As she followed her sister up the stairs and down the hallway to the bathroom, she spread her aching fingers and thought of the rose. She wondered how something so beautiful could hurt you so badly. She lifted her eyes to her sister, who was ransacking the bathroom for antiseptic and a band-aid. Buffy was the queen of hurtful beautiful things. But then she always had words as rough as her hands to make Dawn's admiration of her beauty dissipate.

Dawn wanted to be like her sister sometimes, but she didn't want her to know it. She'd die before she let Buffy know that she was a hero, and not just when it came to the forces of good and evil, vampires and stuff. Buffy secured the band-aids too tightly around Dawn's fingers, cutting off the circulation and turning her finger pads a strange purple. "Owe, owe, owe," said Dawn, but her cries went unheard as Buffy finished taping her up and went back to her own much more interesting life.

--

Dawn was out back, eyes carefully following three beetles up the trunk of a tree, when she heard voices approaching. She hurried to the fence with its holes between the planks where she could see without being seen. Or so went the theory.

Out by the street, she saw Buffy walking slowly. She watched her sister's fingers intertwine with a larger hand. Angel's. The air was cold and part of Dawn wanted to give in and go warm herself indoors, but part of her "job" as the newly crowned spy was to always be there when something was happening, even if it meant standing in the chill of the night and convincing herself over and over that she was _not_ afraid of the dark.

She cringed when her mother stuck her head out the back door and called for her. "Bedtime!" Joyce announced, eyes traveling all over the backyard in search of her youngest. Dawn ducked behind the fence post, ashamed to have been caught.

Buffy and Angel's heads turned toward the yard, and Dawn's face flushed red when Buffy explained, "She's going through her annoying 'I look like Harriet the Spy' phase. She's everywhere, all the time, just watching me."

Even though no one could physically see her embarrassment, Dawn clapped her hands over her face and crouched low against the fence. Her mother called out that she had a five minute warning, and then disappeared inside the house again. Dawn waited for the figurative dust to clear, then used her band-aid-clad fingers to help push herself up into her previous position, staring at Buffy and her big, strong boyfriend.

Buffy was talking so quietly that Dawn couldn't identify all of her words. "...wish you could stay," was at the tail end.

"I should get going," Angel said, softly plucking Buffy's smaller fingers from his as if opening flower petals from their core. There was no argument said out loud, but Dawn knew her sister and Angel had some kind of silent language between them. They shared a few tender kisses before Angel disappeared with his trench coat as dark as the night.

Dawn was half disgusted by the affection displayed. There was nothing grosser than her sister kissing somebody. But on the other hand, a part of her ached to be cared for that way. And a deeper part of her wondered if she ever would.

She walked into Buffy's room without knocking after she finished her nightly routine. Her pink pajama pants tripped her a bit, as the legs were too long, but she managed to land on Buffy's bed, thus escaping any more scrapes that day.

What started off as questions for Buffy soon turned into an interrogation of sorts, about boys, and how to tell someone you like them "in a way that'll make them like you back -- even if they didn't before."

Buffy turned around in her vanity chair to confront her little sister face-to-face. "Who is it you're talking about, and why am I having to endure this conversation at nine o'clock at night?"

Immediately Dawn scoffed: "Like I'd ever tell you." _Oh, that it's Xander!_ she longed to exclaim. She'd only met him a couple of times, and Buffy never let her actually speak to him, which was good, because she tended to stumble over her words when she was nervous, and she guessed that usually boys didn't go for that. "Mom says not to ask you those kinds of things. I think it's because you kill things so you wouldn't know about love and stuff. 'Cause all you do is hate."

Buffy's eyebrows furrowed as she was obviously insulted. "I -- I don't... kill things." She gathered a new thought quickly. "I vanquish them."

Dawn shook her head. "Those ladies on 'Charmed' _vanquish_ things. You just look them in the eye and kill... You don't recite poems or anything."

Buffy's expression darkened, and she pointed to the open door. "What kind of shows are you watching? Dawn, I don't have time for this. I've got Slayage stuff to do, I don't have to listen to you and your insults, which by the way, are completely of the suck." She did then as she did nearly every night: continued to point out of her room until Dawn gave up and left. This time even without Mr. Gordo in her usually sly clutches.

--

There came one night when Buffy didn't make it home at all. Dawn yawned as her digital clock changed every sixty seconds. Her eyes were closed in slumber while Buffy's absence waned on and on. Mom made waffles in the morning, and by the time Dawn was awake and tasting them, Buffy had left again.

--

Buffy thought she was so special, with her job that didn't pay a thing, and that she couldn't even tell people about. Dawn had been sworn to secrecy on Buffy's "calling", but sometimes she found it really hard not to blurt out all that it frustrated her to know. She wanted to tell someone cool about it, and see them laugh and agree that being a Slayer was like Halloween all year 'round; but without the candy.

Dawn's sister was always stealing her Halloween candy -- she had been since Dawn could remember. Last Halloween, when Buffy started eating out of Dawn's bag without asking, Dawn started stealing Mr. Gordo from his place on Buffy's bed. Every few days or so, his absence was noticed, and Dawn's room was searched by her mother while she hovered in the corner with angry storms in her eyes.

"Buffy should give me back my candy if she wants her pig," she insisted, but it was no use. It seemed that Buffy always got her way. And she had the nerve to say that things were the other way around.

"You can't steal him," Buffy said, her voice as snotty as Dawn's sixth grade enemy. "You don't even know what that pig means to me."

Dawn faltered just slightly in her big words. "I wanted him. So I took him. Now I have him and he's mine."

Buffy was frowning and mouthing the words "take, want, have" to herself. Then she shuddered and gave Dawn a big frown. "Next time you take him," Buffy said strongly, her words deadly with promise, "you'll be sorry. You'll even _say_ you're sorry."

"Ugh." Dawn folded her arms across her chest. "You can't make me do anything I don't want to."

"Oh yeah?" Buffy raised an eyebrow, hugging the stuffed animal immaturely to her chest. "Get out." And with that, she shut her bedroom door.

--

Mom was going to have another late night at the gallery. "I want you two girls to be good to each other," she said to Dawn and the absence of Buffy. She was always giving Dawn instructions for the both of them, ignoring the fact that she was supposed to be relaying them to an older sister, who couldn't once just be there in the first place. "You think I don't know, but I hear you two fighting every other sentence."

"Buffy starts it." Dawn chewed on the inside of her lip.

"I hear the opposite from her." Joyce leveled her youngest with her eyes. "Just do your best to keep the peace."

Dawn sighed as Buffy came in through the kitchen door just as their mother was exiting. When Buffy's mind seemed elsewhere, Dawn tried to be playful. She hovered a thumbtack over Buffy's head and said, "You're under attack."

Buffy wasn't as amused as she should have been. She swatted Dawn and her tack away.

Instead of making one of her grossalicious dinners that utilized the microwave more than was natural, Buffy headed upstairs to her room. Dawn was bored, listless, and followed. She stood in Buffy's bedroom doorway as her sister sat before the mirror and began fixing the small details of the make-up on her face.

Though she kept it to herself, Dawn loved to watch those older than her do grown-up things. It was one of her favorite pastimes to sit cross-legged on Buffy's bed and watch her apply foundation, eyeliner, mascara, and more. Buffy had a style that was distinctly different from their mother. Where Mom was subtle with swipes of earth tones along her eyelids and thin layers of lipstick, Buffy went buck wild sometimes dressing her face up like a doll's. Buffy's make-up personality was much more showy, and it was the one Dawn preferred, though you'd have to torture her with 'Saved By the Bell' reruns to get her to admit it.

Buffy was curling her eyelashes with the device that Dawn was afraid to let near her own face, and asking why Dawn was always bugging her while she got ready. Why she had such strange fascinations.

Dawn ignored her and began talking while she watched from behind Buffy on the bed. "There's this new girl at school, Janice? And she is like so cool, she puts on blush and lipstick after the last bell rings at school. She's the only girl my age who knows how to do it right. She says it's only hard if your face isn't right for the colors you have."

Buffy's reflection in the mirror showed that her eyes darkened with annoyance at having to hear about this particular girl again. "And once again, you eat up every word this new girl says. It's pathetic, Dawn, the way you tell me that you and everyone else just follow Janice around."

"You mean like people used to do for you?" Dawn deadpanned. She raised her eyebrows so that Buffy could see them in the mirror. Dawn remembered how it was, sitting in the back seat of Mom and Dad's car in LA waiting for miss "May Queen, May Queen" to tear herself away from her gigantic posse.

Apparently popularity had an expiration date.

Buffy swept excess eyeshadow from her trembling eyelids. "Nobody likes a know-it-all, Dawn," she said, and nothing further for thirty seconds. "Besides, that me is a world away now."

"Like, in outer space?" Dawn asked her, perplexed.

"Sure," Buffy answered with a giggle. Dawn didn't get Buffy's humor any more than Buffy got hers. It seemed like Buffy was always laughing at things that weren't funny. Especially her own little jokes. Dawn never laughed at them, nor did she tell her sister that sometimes she recycled them to impress people at school. "You're such a goody-goody," Buffy told Dawn without turning around to face her.

"I -- I can be bad. Super bad. You don't even know," Dawn told her immediately, stung by the words Buffy threw at her too often.

"Nope, I don't," Buffy said, disinterested.

"I could be badder than you if I tried."

"Don't."

"So you can and I can't? Why? Why?" She would keep pecking at Buffy's nerve endings with the repetition if it weren't for Buffy's quick answer.

"There are a lot of things in the world you don't know about."

"But of course you won't teach me. Boys at school are mean -- why can't I punch them the way you do to people?"

Buffy gave a tired sigh. It wasn't often that Dawn saw Buffy showing signs of tiredness. She was the Energizer Bunny's pal, going, going, staking. "Because you're Dawn, and not me."

"Story of my life..." Dawn said under her breath.

"No, that would be written in the many Hello Kitty diaries under your bed."

Dawn immediately grew serious. "How do you know about those?"

"It's not cool to be bad the way you're thinking, Dawn. Not cool to kill things, not cool to watch them die."

"But you do --"

"Enough." Buffy stood, her face perfected, fluffed her hair just right, and exited the bedroom without seeming to care if Dawn followed her. "When did Mom say she was coming home tonight? I need to get out."

Dawn drifted into the hall to see Buffy's body trying to work off its own energy, her leg muscles flexing as she hustled down the stairs. Dawn knew Buffy would leave her even before Faith came by to convince Buffy to disappear into the darkening night.

--

She was all alone in the house. Dawn chose to keep her mind off of the fear surging through her body with every door that creaked, every light switch that was turned off and hidden from her searching hands. Instead of rehearsing the way she would tell as soon as Mom got home, she went to Buffy's room which she was never supposed to enter on her own. She picked up a tube of lipstick and set to work on her babyish face.

Buffy came home before Mom had a chance to hear the abandonment story of the night. Dawn confronted her sister in the upstairs hallway. She waited for Buffy's eyes to fill with awe, but something else occupied them instead. Dawn teetered on the pair of Mom's high heels pinching her feet, trying to keep the ill-fitting miniskirt from Buffy's closet smoothed down. She'd looked in the mirror just moments ago, and liked what she saw. Even though no one else could probably stand to look at her gaudy face.

When enough time passed and there was no response from her sister, Dawn asked uncertainly, "You don't think it looks good?"

She was waiting for Buffy to tell her that she was magnificent, how she was the most sophisticated looking sixth grader there ever could be. She was dressed like a bad, bad girl, and she couldn't wait for confirmation of the fact.

What she got instead from Buffy were these defeated words: "Dawnie, it looks hideous. Go wash it off."

"Do I look really, really bad, then?" Dawn asked, deflated.

Buffy's voice was cracking, and in the shadows of the unlit hallway, Dawn swore she could see a tear on each cheek. "Not the way you want. Dawnie, please. You don't want to be bad. Just be a kid while you can. I wish I would have."

The bathroom sink was unsympathetic as Dawn cried from the pain of the soap in her eyes while she scrubbed at the clinging eyeshadow. Buffy eventually came into the bathroom, hearing Dawn's pained and disappointed wails, and used one of her fancy make-up remover towelettes to take the sting and the make-up from Dawn's eyes. Dawn's tears stopped, but Buffy's did not.

When her face was scrubbed red and raw, the skin under her eyes bloated from the harshness of the soap, Dawn sighed and sat on the edge of the bathtub. "Buffy?" she asked, feeling her way along. "What... Buffy, what's wrong with you?" She could hear her sister's words again, coming back to her. _Just be a kid while you can. I wish I would have._

Buffy looked more broken than bad as she took Dawn's hand in a rare gesture, and led her to Mom's bedroom. Something about Mom's bed, the smell of it, the bigness of it, had comforted both girls since the comfort of their father split.

Buffy sat on the bed, tears continuing to fall. Dawn thought Buffy was seeing something other than Mom's bedroom walls with her eyes. It looked like Buffy was reliving something that Dawn could never see herself. Buffy gestured for Dawn to come fill her lap, and though reluctantly, Dawn did so. There, her big sister held her like she hadn't done in months. Her warm tears fell to wet Dawn's newly scrubbed neck.

Drowning in the misunderstanding of it all, Dawn's words came bubbling up from within her. She promised that she would be good, and stop trying to be so bad. She promised to try without understanding the why's of it.

Hearing Buffy's pain come out through ragged sobs and sniffles, Dawn watched tears of her own glisten in the window's moonlight. And she thought, maybe for the first time, that being small-scale could be the way to stay. Danger had colored her sister's face pink like a fever that night, and Dawn had to admit she was okay with not knowing what it was Buffy saw behind the eyelids she now had closed. Buffy drifted off to sleep behind Dawn, arms wrapped around her to trap her and keep her right there. She didn't struggle to leave, or tell Mom about Buffy's bad babysitting the next day.

She placed Mr. Gordo back on Buffy's bed after school without being prompted to do so. She stayed away from dark red lipstick and rose thorns to draw blood. Now, she used her magnifying glass to peer at Buffy from a room away and wait for her sister to find a genuine smile again.

- -  
end


End file.
